Emaculation News: August 2008

Emulation Oddities

I did a bit more poring through the ol' emulation vault.

I discovered one more delightful blast from the past: CharredPC's Emulation Oddities. A neat old site from 2001ish. It contains a couple nice articles, and a review of “WORM” that might actually be helpful to some people! It was built by “CharredPC,” an old Internet crony of mine whom I unfortunately haven't spoken to for a couple of years.

It's been on the server for a long time, but hasn't been linked to for many years. Check it out.

— ClockWise, August 31 2008

More Files!

Jim “Jimmy” Watters is celebrating the ninth anniversary of his emulation forum over in this thread. by posting lots of odds and ends, previously thought to be lost in the mists of time… read up on Fusion documentation, booth babes, and Microcode vaporware.

My contribution to the thread was to post both versions of MacEmu Zic, an old SoftMac spoof from 2000 to 2002 that is still hilarious, but that no one but me seems to remember. Direct downloads for that are over here.

The EmuWiki, meanwhile, now contains a mountain of content and files related to Mac Emulation. Check out, for example, the Basilisk II section for a massive archive of old releases, and a neat collection of YouTube videos. There's still more to contribute, if you want to… you can see lots of red links to biographical and historical pages that have not yet been created.

— ClockWise, August 30 2008

68K Softwares!

Okay. Just about done with Basilisk II stuff now. I wrote an article highlighting some essential 68K software for your emulated Macintosh. All of it runs in System 7. It's really just a collection of stuff highlighted in all the other guides, but I'm open to suggestions. If anyone has any personal must-haves, send me an e-mail and I'll add them to the list.

Professor Mihocka!

Of interest to readers is a ten page PDF document which summarizes the last decade of Darek's Dirty Secrets!

The posting also answers a long standing “where are they now” of the emulation scene: Ignac Kolenko, who in 1987 co-founded what would later become Emulators, Inc is now a professor at Conestoga College!

—ClockWise, August 26, 2008

Instant Messaging in the 68K Macintosh!

Hey, so getting an instant messenger working in my emulated Macintosh running System 7 has always been a dream of mine. Google never released a 68K client for Google Talk, the 68K ICQ client stopped working last month and the third party MSN client stopped working a long time ago.

All of the web-based IM clients don't work in the old 68k-compatible browsers.

Nonetheless, I have finally found a way! Stephen introduced me to Bitlbee a couple of days ago. Bitlbee is a project that allows IRC servers to access all of the popular IM networks, including Google Talk/Jabber, MSN, AIM, ICQ!

I've written a short illustrated guide to getting Bitlbee set up in System 7.5.5 within Basilisk II. Check it out. It's not specific to the emulated Mac, and really could be helpful to anyone trying to make their ancient computer relevant to today's world!

There's a couple more Basilisk related things I would like to write and then I think I will be finished. Yay!

— ClockWise, August 24 2008

Files! So Many File!

Jim Watters uploaded his massive and monumental collection of emulation files to the EmuWiki project a couple of days ago. The admin of that site has began the long task of sorting through the collection. You can find the beginnings of that work on the History of Basilisk II page, which is already looking like a great collection of old Basilisk II releases.

Meanwhile, I have made a little collection myself… a collection of some recent unofficial builds of SheepShaver, Basilisk II and Mini vMac that have been posted to the forum. You can see that over here. The collection mainly exists so that the builds are not “hidden away” in the forum where internet seekers cannot easily find them.

More updates to follow.

(fun fact: There actually is a 68K Jabber client called Jabbernaut that is really really old and that no one seems to be able to use properly)

— ClockWise, August 21 2008

Emu Wiki

I updated a whole bunch of typos in the new individual emulator pages. I should have done some proof-reading before uploading them. Whoops.

The reason I cleaned them up was that I adapted and uploaded a bunch of the emulator descriptions and histories to a new webpage called EmuWiki. That site is a new wiki type page that hopes to compile a history of emulation. Computer emulators, console emulators, calculator emulators… emulators of all sorts! Of course, since it is a wiki, you can go and create content yourself. The Mac emulation (Mac-on-PC, anyways) section is over here. My work can be found by clicking on the “history” section. Everyone should go and fix my mistakes. Actually, if you do that I can easily integrate your corrections back into the content on the main site.

More updates on this site are coming soon…

— ClockWise, August 19 2008

Basilisk II for PSP Updated

I missed this one from a few weeks ago, but there is an updated version of the PSP port of Basilisk II over here.

From the author:

“I made changes to the non-platform-specific code (particularly the FPU emulation), so I've bumped the version to 1.1. I'll probably make some changes and bug fixes later, so I'm calling this 1.1.0. Two main downloads for the binary and one of the source are available. The larger binary archive comes with a nice BIG guide, so I archived it with 7zip. If you don't know how to handle 7zip, google it.”

and a couple of days later…

“Now updated to 1.1.1. Changes include - newer code base. IR keyboard files made relative and included with program (should help people who don't know who to setup pspirkeyb). IR keyboard was verified working with 4.01 M33-2. Program is slightly faster (about six percent). Added two 16: 9 video modes to the Mac side for people who use the LCD or an HDTV.”

Couple Fixes

I made a few more minor tweaks here and there. I'm going on vacation for nine days starting tomorrow, and I won't be able to do any updates during that time. I would like to write a SoftMac guide, but the current beta fails to boot on both my home machine and my work machine. The 2002 release works, however, so I might write a bit about that when I get back home.

— ClockWise, August 8 2008

Yet More Housekeeping!

I cleaned up the articles page, fixing a couple of broken internal links, getting rid of some dated articles and linking to the new setup articles for vMac and Basilisk. All of the old articles work, but a few of them need some formatting adjustments. I'll get on that.

If anyone wants to contribute some articles, please get in touch with me via e-mail. I'd love to publish some more fresh content. Setup guides, editorials, benchmarks, whatever…

I would like to write a few new guides myself. I'm very tempted to adapt the Basilisk II guide into a SoftMac guide, particularly since the official SoftMac page is all about setting up Mac OS 8.1.

I'd like to write a Sheepshaver guide, although the official site has all sorts of effective documentation already. And while PearPC lacks a good help guide, the emulator is too difficult for a dummy like me to use.

— ClockWise, August 7 2008

A Few Updates

I updated the staff page, which I think had not been touched since 1999. Really. Meanwhile, Stephen cleaned up the help page.

More Fresh Content!

I've written a quick guide to getting online with Basilisk II JIT for Windows. It is located over here. It uses the old Nat/Router feature that hasn't really been documented so well since Lauri took his page offline.

While creating the guide I was really blown away by how awesome iCab 2.99 (68K) is. I'm gob-smacked by the availability of something new and fresh and functional for my System 7 setup.

The guide was the product of only a couple hours work, and so might contain some mistakes… stop by the forum to make suggestions and corrections.

— ClockWise, August 4 2008

Mini vMac: Mac II Emulation!

Paul Pratt wrote on the official Mini vMac page that “the latest Development source snapshot has the Mac II emulation getting close to useable. The video now works, but there is still an issue with cursor display.”

Wow!

I compiled the latest snapshot and put it online over in the forum. I'm afraid that I don't have the appropriate ROM image, so I cannot test it out. Someone who has the ability should really test out the new features…

Both of these are very new. Check them out and post any necessary corrections in the message board.

— ClockWise, August 1, 2008

Emaculation Must Less Dusty!

Okay, so the Wordpress database is still a little bit broken. HOWEVER, the rest of the site is doing really well these days. Stephen and I and carrying out a large overhaul of the site. Everything is starting to look a lot less dusty. So far, I've managed to update all of the individual emulator pages. Those are the pages linked to on the sidebar. The information there now reflects the current status of each emulator, and the web links and file links are all working. The code on those pages has also been cleaned up a fair bit thanks to some guidance from Ronald P Regensburg, one of our forum mods.

There's a lot more coming. I want to spruce up the old stuff and also create some new stuff. Stay tuned.

(Meanwhile, you should check out the aforementioned forum. It's seeing a fair bit of traffic these days)